Editor's Letter

It's a Noir, Noir, Noir World

The race is on in Los Angeles and Washington for two of the great brass rings of contemporary American society—the Oscar and the presidency. In this celebrity-crazed culture, it's a toss-up as to which is the most aspired to. My money would be on Oscar—he attracts fame, riches, and really good-looking members of the opposite (or same) sex. Plus, the victor never goes anywhere without those rose-petal words "Academy Award winner" decorating the path ahead. The presidency bestows all the legal levers of power available to the person charged with safeguarding the most powerful nation on earth—and, following the rise of the "unitary presidency" under President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, a lot of illegal levers as well.

In this our 13th annual Hollywood Issue, we have news of both reel and real worlds. And thanks to the efforts of our publisher, Edward Menicheschi, and his league of loyalists, this is not only the biggest Hollywood Issue ever, but also the biggest single issue in the magazine's history. We have veered from the traditional portfolio this year, and, inspired by a plan of fashion and style director Michael Roberts's and executed by photographer Annie Leibovitz with the help of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, we have crafted a storyboarded noir film, featuring many of this year's Oscar contenders. "Killers Kill, Dead Men Die," on page 401, is a visual and literary tour de force that pays tribute to the noir films of the 40s and 50s—a genre that, as Ann Douglas, author of the acclaimed Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, states in an accompanying essay, remains vital as an antidote to American self-infatuation and is especially evident at times when a "take-sides, either-or mentality" is in force. Two superb films this season, Martin Scorsese's The Departed and his longtime colleague Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd, continue the noir tradition. As does the life of someone you've probably never heard of. Two and a half years ago, Pat Dollard, a moderately successful talent agent, chucked it all to make a pro-war documentary in Iraq. As Evan Wright recounts in "Pat Dollard's War on Hollywood," on page 444, he took a detour off the grid of life that makes for one of the more amazing tales you will ever read.

Elsewhere in the issue are three major reports, all having to do with the unchecked powers of the sitting administration: "Taking on Guantánamo," by Marie Brenner, on page 328; "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow," by Donald Barlett and James Steele, on page 342; and "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq," by Craig Unger, on page 292. In the president's January 10 speech, in which he announced his plan for a troop surge in Iraq—"surge," or "augmentation," being White House shorthand for escalation—he mentioned Iran no fewer than six times. Incredible as it might seem, a massive air strike against Iran is still on the table. In his report, Unger traces the neoconservative appetite for regime change in Iran back more than a decade. He also reveals that the Bush administration rebuffed Iranian offers in 2003 to curb its nuclear programs and combat terrorists within its borders and chose instead to pursue a dubious alliance with the MEK, a group of Iranian radicals the U.S. was supporting in the hope of effecting regime change there. As Philip Giraldi, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism specialist, told Unger: "It is Iraq redux." While Bush is busy shaking his saber at both Iran and Syria, he should heed the outcome of the last nation that attempted to fight a war on umpteen fronts at once: Germany.

The strain on the families of the 1.4 million troops who have carried out the president's wars in and around Iraq and Afghanistan is mind-boggling. The injury-to-death ratio (that is, the number of soldiers injured compared with the number of soldiers killed) is 16 to 1, more than five times the ratio in Korea and Vietnam, and eight times the ratio in the two World Wars. To be sure, the reason for the increase in wounded versus killed is that medical advances have made it possible to save soldiers with injuries that would have been untreatable in past wars. But as Linda Bilmes points out in a research paper for the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Pentagon's inept accounting practices have resulted in hundreds of horribly injured troops' being hounded for money they don't owe. She tells of an Army Reserve staff sergeant who lost half a leg, then was denied a mortgage because the Department of Defense claimed he owed it $2,231. The soldier spent a year and a half trying to sort that one out. Bilmes describes how the Pentagon treated another staff sergeant, who had suffered massive brain damage. After it mistakenly recorded that he owed $12,000, the Pentagon stopped his pay, and the man's utilities were turned off.

This month marks the Vanity Fair debut of two of the finest investigative journalists of our age: Donald Barlett and James Steele. With numerous honors in their bookcases (including two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Magazine Awards), they report this issue on a powerful, but little-known, federal supplier that has 9,000 active contracts with the U.S. government and a workforce of 44,000. San Diego–based Science Applications International Corporation is, quite simply, the brain to Halliburton's brawn. So pervasive is it in the military-political food chain that SAIC personnel were instrumental in advising the administration that Iraq had W.M.D. It then secured contracts for the search for the non-existent weapons. And when no weapons were found, the company helped staff the commission charged with investigating how U.S. intelligence could have gotten the W.M.D. story so wrong. This is stuff even Hollywood can't make up.

Graydon Carter is the editor of Vanity Fair. His books include What We've Lost (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Oscar Night: 75 Years of Hollywood Parties (Knopf).